1. Field of the Invention
The invention is a system and method for providing periodic evaluation and rehabilitation to patients in their home or while on travel. The invention integrates videogames with additional software layers to transform a hand-held communication device (such as a cell phone or BlackBerry®) into a rehabilitation device. Finally, the system allows monitoring and coaching of the patient by a remote clinician as well as online storage of data obtained by the hand held communication device (for example, a cell phone) during periodic evaluation and rehabilitation.
2. Description of Related Art
Several patents describe networked systems for remote health monitoring. U.S. Pat. No. 5,997,476 describes a networked system for communicating information to an individual and remotely monitoring the individual. The system includes a remote interface of a personal computer and a server. The apparatus interacts with the individual in accordance with a script received from the server. The script is programmed to communicate queries to the individual, receive responses to the queries and transmit the responses to the server.
A Wearable Wireless Body Area Network of Intelligent motion sensors has been described Jovanov et al. “A Wireless Body Area Network of Intelligent Motion Sensors for Computer Assisted Physical Rehabilitation”, Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, 2:6 (2005). The system includes sensors that communicate wirelessly with a personal server. The sensors include accelerators and gyroscopes attached to body parts of the user. The personal server communicates with a remote health care server and servers of related services. The personal server provides an audio and graphical user interface to relay early warnings or guidance to the user.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,940,801 describes a diagnostic assessment of physiological conditions which employs a videogame. Information from the videogame such as a sequence of tasks and reaction time can be analyzed to determine whether clinical therapy and/or medication may be required.
It is desirable to provide a telerehabilitation system for remote periodic evaluation and rehabilitation of a patient in which a portable device including a multitude of videogames can be used to receive finger, wrist and/or arm movements, and/or another movement of other various appendages during play for exercising and the movements of the fingers, wrists, arms and/or other appendages are remotely monitored such that exercise can be scheduled and monitored based on the received data.